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QuoteI have one major concern about Hapgood's interpretation of the Finaeus map (and therefore the Schoner 1524 map as well), and that is the scale of the map

I have a major concern with Hapgood's theory of overscaling as well. If he had taken the extra time to think it out or even draw it out he would have seen how bad a theory it actually is. My guess is that this was the closest he could come to reconciling the overscaling and conveniently called it good and moved on.

If the copyist confused the 80th parallel with the Antarctic Circle—66.6° latitude—and the source map was inscribed with additional latitudinal delineations as Hapgood also suggests, this would mean that the source map had very little resemblance to Finé and Mercator's rendering of the continent and in turn have had very little resemblance to Antarctica.

The error that Hapgood is postulating would have the copyist overscaling the continent's interior by enlarging it 13-plus degrees latitude in all directions, but maintaining proper latitudinal scaling beyond the Antarctic Circle with the aid of latitudes marked on the source map. The result would actually be a major distortion or shortening of the continent's perimetric features. This would be similar to an artist doubling or tripling the torso of a model, but maintaining the limbs at their normal size. In the case of both the cartographer and the artist, there is absolutely no possible way that they could overlook the fact that their resulting images in no way resembled the original subject.

Hapgood's errant explanation for the overscaling is the very reason I took it upon myself to determine the actual cause, and in so doing discovered that Schöner was incorporating ancient maps of unknown lands onto his 1515 and 1524 globes by aligning geographical features of these ancient maps to geographical features recently discovered. Hence his incorporation of Agrippa's Orbis Terrarum onto his 1515 globe with the English Channel representing a nonexistent strait falsely reported in 1508 and an ancient map of Antarctica to his 1524 globe by matching Atka Bay and the islands of Carney and Siple to the only two features reported discovered on Magellan's Voyage, a southern bay inside the Strait of Magellan and a set of islands known as the Unfortunate Islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

In this particular scenario Australia does not have to factor in at all.